and total control over the people, we decided to flee Vietnam a few years later. Boat people were born. The Vietnamese government did not care about them and the Thai government was not anxious to receive large boatloads of refugees. No one cared about the fate of the boat people so allegations of piracy were often ignored. Memorial built by Vietnamese boat people to be demolished; Jun 30, 05 3:32am. A group of former Vietnamese boat people are touring the Malaysian grave sites of fellow refugees who died while attempting to flee Vietnam's communist regime decades ago, Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt , or less commonly Việt ngữ [2] ), formerly known under the French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam ), is the national and official language of Vietnam . It is the mother tongue of Vietnamese people ( người Việt or người Kinh ), who constitute 86% of Vietnam's population , and of about three million overseas Vietnamese , Vietnamese appears to have been heavily influenced by its location in the Southeast Asian sprachbund The ancestor of the Vietnamese language was originally based in the area of the Red River in what is now northern Vietnam, and during the subsequent expansion of the Vietnamese language and people into what is now central and southern Vietnam Vietnamese is spoken throughout Vietnam by the Vietnamese people as well as by ethnic minorities. It is also spoken in overseas Vietnamese communities, by the Vietnamese people for millennia, written Vietnamese did not become the official administrative language of Vietnam until the 20th century. For most of its history, the entity now known as Vietnam used written classical Chinese for governing purposes. Written Vietnamese in the form of chữ nôm Vietnamese has a comparatively large number of vowels ( nguyên âm ). Vietnamese uses grammatical particles or syntactic constructionVietnamese is often erroneously considered to be a "monosyllabic" language. It is true that Vietnamese has many words that consist of only one syllable; however, As a result of a thousand years of Chinese domination, much of Vietnamese vocabulary relating to science and politics are derived from Chinese. As much as 60% of the vocabulary have Chinese roots, although many compound words are Sino- Vietnamese , composed of native Vietnamese words combined with the Chinese borrowings. Reduplication is a regular part of the language that usually denotes intensity. One can usually distinguish between a native Vietnamese word and a Chinese borrowing if it can be reduplicated or its meaning doesn't change when the tone is shifted. As a result of French colonization, Vietnamese also has words borrowed from the French language . Recently many words are borrowed from English , for example TV (pronounced tivi ), phông for font. Sometimes these borrowings are calques literally translated into Vietnamese ( phần mềm for software, lit. soft part).